Donald Trump has often complained that Pfizer, Inc. slow-walked the rollout of their COVID-19 vaccine in late 2020 to ensure his defeat in the presidential election.
There was no proof of this claim. Now, British drug company GSK, a main rival of Pfizer, claims that there may be some truth to that charge.
GSK's former head of vaccine development, Philip Dormitzer, who worked at Pfizer, Inc. and helped develop the mRNA COVID-19 vaccine, told colleagues at GSK in 2024 that Pfizer delayed the announcement of the success of their vaccine trials until after the 2020 election. Federal prosecutors are looking into the allegation and have already interviewed at least two people, including a GSK executive who was reportedly present at the meeting with Dormitzer when the scientist made the charge.
Dormitzer headed up Pfizer's vaccine research and development before moving to GSK in 2021. He released a statement denying the allegation.
“My Pfizer colleagues and I did everything we could to get the FDA’s Emergency Use Authorization at the very first possible moment,” he said. “Any other interpretation of my comments about the pace of the vaccine’s development would be incorrect.”
It isn’t clear what potential violations could be at issue. The prosecutors’ inquiry into GSK’s information, related to the oft-repeated Trump accusation, comes as the Justice Department also has opened a range of investigations into Trump’s perceived detractors in recent months, including a new investigation into the 2020 election.
Pfizer said it hadn’t received any inquiries from prosecutors on the subject. It said the vaccine development was driven by science and guided by the Food and Drug Administration, and that the “tireless work of scientists, regulators, and thousands of clinical trial volunteers” made the vaccine possible. “Pfizer remains ready, willing, and able to explain why any allegation of impropriety is utter nonsense,” it said.
GSK declined to comment on the investigation. It said that Dormitzer—who for three years led its vaccine research and development after a six-year stint at Pfizer—left for “reasons unrelated to GSK.”
Trump has always questioned the timing of the Pfizer announcement regarding the successful clinical vaccine trials. The company announced the success of the trials on November 8, just days after Trump lost the 2020 election.
The political value of an earlier announcement of Pfizer's successful vaccine development is impossible to know. The effect would have been negligible if we were talking about a delay of days. But a delay of a month would have given the news time to be digested across the country. Given the extremely small margin for Biden in several swing states, it's not impossible to believe that the news of a successful vaccine on the way might have changed some minds.
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"Operation Warp Speed," the program to develop a COVID-19 vaccine, was a triumph of American organizational management and know-how. A vaccine that usually took seven to 10 years to build, test, and bring to market made it to market in less than a year. It was a "miracle," according to most of the vaccine research community.
If Hillary Clinton had been president, it would have taken three to five times longer, given all the idiotic rules on the color of researchers, grants going to minority companies, and other DEI nonsense that would have delayed progress.
Trump never gets enough credit for pushing the development of a vaccine that saved tens of millions of lives around the world. But it's clear that without his advocacy, it would have taken a lot longer to develop an effective counter to the coronavirus.
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